I ran into Joe Clark’s blog due to some other teapot-tempest thing, but I’m a fan for an article on one aspect of Canadian vs. American pronunciation – what I call, since I’m not a linguist, the ‘pasta’ issue. (In short, Canadian ‘pasta’ = the word ‘past’ with an ‘a’ on the end. American ‘pasta’ is ‘pahsta’.)
I’ve been in America since September 2001 – getting close to eight years. During that time I’ve spent less than a week in Canada each year. That much relocation does things to your accent. However, I’ve noticed that some aspects of my Canadian accent are more durable than others. Right now, I do the following:
a) Almost 100% of the time, I pronounce ‘sorry’ to rhyme with ‘story’. Americans tend to pronounce this like the Indian garment ‘sari’ and they always sound a bit angry to me when they say it. You can never be 100% certain, but after seven years this doesn’t seem to have changed in the slightest.
b) The ‘ou’ dipthongs. ‘Out and about the house’. In Southparkese, ‘aboot’, although that’s not quite it. The Canadian comes out more when I’m drunk or agitated, but it’s still detectable when I’m sober. However, it’s not as pronounced as when I lived in Canada. Not sure how fast it’s fading, or if it’ll ever completely go away.
c) The word ‘been’ – Canadian ‘bean’ (usually), American ‘bin’. I’ve noticed that I now use both interchangeably and can’t predict what I’ll do under any situation. However, Canadians themselves do exactly the same thing – under rare circumstances I’ve heard my own family say ‘bin’.
d) The ‘past’+a / ‘pasta’ issue. Almost 100% of the time, I’ll use the American pronunciation. The exceptions I know about: if the ‘a’ is followed by ‘l’, like ‘alcove’ or ‘balcony’, I’ll still sound like a Canadian, and if I just don’t know how to pronounce the word because I don’t use it much, my guess uses Canadian rules.
I haven’t consciously made any effort to modify my speech – so why are some aspects of my Canadian accent still going strong, while others have been almost completely eliminated? There’s a ton of Canadians in America – according to this, over 800,000 of us (1 in 50!) – which you think would make this a fruitful topic for study. If anyone wanders by this entry and knows of some interesting academic work on accent change in Canadian emigres to America, let me know.
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See http://jimflege.com/files/Munro_Derwing_Flege_1999_Canadians_Alabama_JP_1999.pdf. Apparently this is called dialect acquisition.
As someone who dropped his English accent like a live grenade on moving to the US at age 6, I think the primary motivation for this type of shift is psychological. To some degree we cling to our native dialect as an intrinsic part of our identity, but we also tend to reject our “uncool” roots (as personified by our parents) in favor of our new, hipper surroundings (personified by our peer group).
Exactly what shifts take place in a given individual might be random, or there might be some very interesting phonological phenomena going on (e.g. we might adopt sounds in the local dialect that are similar to sounds used in different contexts in our native dialect, while rejecting sounds that never occur in our native dialect). Very interesting topic for a dissertation if anyone wants to run out and get a PhD in linguistics.
From an Australian standpoint both your offered Pasta pronounciations are equivalent.